Sandra Belloni — Complete eBook

The recent scene concerned chiefly the actors who
had moved onward: it had touched Emilia but lightly,
and him not at all. But, while he magnified the
glory of her singing, the imperishable note she had
sounded this night, and the power and the triumph
that would be hers, Emilia’s bosom began to
heave, and she checked him with a storm of tears.
“Triumph! yes! what is this I have done?
Oh, Merthyr, my, true hero! He praises me and
knows nothing of how false I have been to you.
I am a slave! I have sold myself—­sold
myself!” She dropped her face in her hands,
broken with grief. “He fights,” she
pursued; “he fights for my country. I feel
his blood—­it seems to run from my body as
it runs from his. Not if he is dying—­I
dare not go to him if he is dying! I am in chains.
I have sworn it for money. See what a different
man Merthyr is from any on earth! Would he shoot
himself for a woman? Would he grow meaner the
more he loved her? My hero! my hero! and Tracy,
my friend! what is my grief now? Merthyr is my
hero, but I hear him—­I hear him speaking
it into my ears with his own lips, that I do not love
him. And it is true. I never should have
sold myself for three weary years away from him, if
I had loved him. I know it now it is done.
I thought more of my poor friends and Wilfrid, than
of Merthyr, who bleeds for my country! And he
will not spurn me when we meet. Yes, if he lives,
he will come to me gentle as a ghost that has seen
God!”

She abandoned herself to weeping. Tracy, in a
tender reverence for one who could speak such solemn
matter spontaneously, supported her, and felt her
tears as a rain of flame on his heart.

The nightingales were mute. Not a sound was heard
from bough or brake.

CHAPTER LIX

A wreck from the last Lombard revolt landed upon our
shores in June. His right arm was in a sling,
and his Italian servant following him, kept close
by his side, with a ready hand, as if fearing that
at any moment the wounded gentleman’s steps
might fail. There was no public war going on
just then: for which reason he was eyed suspiciously
by the rest of the passengers making their way up
the beach; who seemed to entertain an impression that
he had no business at such a moment to be crippled,
and might be put down as one of those foreign fools
who stand out for a trifle as targets to fools a little
luckier than themselves. Here, within our salt
girdle, flourishes common sense. We cherish life;
we abhor bloodshed; we have no sympathy with your
juvenile points of honour: we are, in short,
a civilized people; and seeing that Success has made
us what we are, we advise other nations to succeed,
or be quiet. Of all of which the gravely-smiling
gentleman appeared well aware; for, with an eye that
courted none, and a perfectly calm face, he passed
through the crowd, only once availing himself of his
brown-faced Beppo’s spontaneously depressed